The People At Bottom Need Visibility

The aim of any rational, humane progress is to bring those people out of sight into visible light in policy attention and positive intervention and enable them to face the uncertainty of time, not subjecting them to powerlessness, out of a range of communication to the outer world and beneath the forgotten surface of politics.  Building a better future for bhui manchhe (people at the bottom of the pyramid of power, wealth and status) is more than merely crafting a response to the past's lost horizon of ordinary Nepalis' struggle for life-saving and life-enhancing innovations. It is about building an understanding of the intricacy of its layered geography, sociology, economy and politics fabricated into different worlds. The theory of narrow utility marks a great separation in lifestyles, materiality and capabilities but common values bind the shared union of Nepali nation as a broad possibility.

Obviously, beneath the facade of reality are the jobless and working-class people uncomfortably conditioned like infants in search of the direction of upward social mobility by deconstructing the socially constructed life of hierarchy and harnessing a sense of belonging to the state. Nepali leaders’ understanding of the social, economic and political configuration of the population and their areas of attention are key variables to knit people’s spirit, courage and vision and overcome the confusion of impersonality of the modern scientific world of rational choice rooted in interests, not shared morals for cooperation. Any pragmatic solution of social control of Nepalis maintained by traditional prejudice, unfair conditions or modern practices of syndicate, monopoly and domination requires transformation across all the layers.

  Mediating forces

Only mediating forces and institutions can tie the bottom to the top of society, set a common path of nation building and help the poor wriggle out of a situation of frostiness. This can bring structural change, remove the stasis and fixed position of people and enable even those at the bottom of society to build national consciousness, push for desirable change and acquire a new adaptability to freedom, reason and modernity to address the soaring costs of living.  Economic uplifting of Nepalis in general and the poor in particular demands the planners and leaders’ contextual awareness of the structural configuration of diverse populations and opening out of national communicative space across the layers of geography, sociology, economy and polity and corresponding stratum created by them. 

The historic evolution of Nepali culture has helped its people to stay away from the natural selection of life, while the genealogy of knowledge provided a template for socialisation, acculturation and continuous adaptation to national spirits. With the onset of technological, democratic and human rights revolution Nepali youths have set a tour de force to define a renewed life of hope, while the pressure of an imagined future has served as a strong motivating factor of political change. The working of the constitutional state of Nepal is vital to set all actors into national projects and tone their innate drive, sense of self and conscience so far tormented by the haziness. Their talk of blaming the past as an enemy of generational justice cannot rescue them if they inherit the same political culture of factionalism, patronage, negation and authoritarian lure. It cannot beat the injustices of rival isms.

 Only a fair society for the poor Nepalis can open them to the shared future. Victory of many parties in scores of elections only showed the elite circulation in power, not the cut of ordinary people’s misery. The contribution of Nepali artists, musicians, priests, poets, singers, scholars and historians’ eloquent rhythms of unity in diversity remained as vivid soft power. So does their spotlight on the poor’s plight in diverse phases of history. To keep the warmth of social trust, the leadership requires inventing disaggregated policies to respond to the national and local problems so that not even a small group like Raute is left behind in silence who only fight for survival against the ferocity of nature and structural determinism. 

Many backward people have gained an awareness of themselves and are now yearning for equal opportunities. Their links to communication are helping them leap out of their context. The cohesion of social order in Nepal needs a balance between each group’s means of its survival and sociable impulse to live together in a bigger community - the state and share common values, interests and identity of citizenship vital for their dignity.  

Nepali economic history is neither linear nor predetermined, without the possibilities to explore choice beyond circumstance. Popular sovereignty bequeathed by ancestors and maintained by the sacrifice of many generations of heroes and builders helped transcend conditioned reflexes. Yet, the nation is now facing an acute internal crisis of poverty, which stands at about 20 per cent. It is spread across various geographical scales and creates a vacuum due to the powerlessness of people. The geographically isolated areas are deprived of education, health, transportation and urban amenities of life, resembling the periphery of the periphery and suffering from the illusion of equal access. Tension occurs when politics provides equal voting rights to all Nepalis while the economy denies them matching property rights. The national budget allocation requires affirming constitutional spirit so that salvation does not wax.

Joblessness and underemployment have externalised the internal problems of seasonal migration of an unaccountable number of working-age population to urban areas and India while forcing about half a million youth population to leave the nation to the global market to sustain life. The remittance they bring is the main source of the national economy and family insurance but its costs to family, agriculture, social progress and the nation is huge. Radical parties are fueling the fire of the oppressed for political stir for justice. The victims of injustice require basic reforms in the nation’s political economy and a sense of distributive justice.  The external crises spring from declining exports, investment and capital expenditure, while a spike in debt and dependence and the nation’s risk of falling in the grey list of the global community. 

Resolving the climate of political uncertainty through depolarisation and de-partisanisation of governance is vital. Responsive rule can rear a safe national space for reflection and crystallisation of common goals of progress. Evolution of national perspective, national self-definition and matching conduct as per constitutional parameters can free the nation from perennial backwater. The zeal and emotion of youth is audible. What they require is reason, wisdom and skill of statecraft so that they do not stand above popular sovereignty, the sanity of tradition and prudence and govern foreign policy but are able to beat the resistance between the reaction of ill-tempered actors and inclusive reforms of the governance, thus enabling the bottom of society to reap development dividends and upend the status quo.  

Nepali leaders must find a common cause in patriotism and empathy with those at the bottom to fill their daily necessities, without whose support their own progress is at risk. The link between shared cause and aspirations for national unity and democracy is positive. But it requires inventiveness of leadership to know first the suffocating condition of living of sukumbasis (landless and homeless), loan shark and cooperative victims, bonded labour and vast sections of those poor surviving in informal sectors with paltry means. The government plans to enact the Predatory Lending Crime Act and settle the problems of Sukumbasis who are fighting their way into visibility. Their fight for justice can offset the autocratic lure of leaders. The institutional discontinuity of land commissions and the patronage character of their leadership have used land distribution to expand political constituencies thus leaving those landless and homeless on the edge of despair, ire and stirs demanding the realization of their constitutional rights to social justice, work and food sovereignty.

 Land to the tillers, no forceful eviction of sukuumbasis, distributive land reforms, support to houses and other accessories have been the perennial political rhetoric of Nepali leaders, which collides with actions. They utilised them for political mobilisation either to dislodge the government or to stage a comeback to power but eventfully leaving them agonized. Two prominent scholars, Prof. Keshav Bhattarai and Dr. Ambika Prasad Adhikari, poignantly revealed the political roots of Nepal’s landlessness. They say, “State failure becomes a resource through which political parties and their leaders sustain influence in society.” But now those victims of dominant structures -- cooperative fraud, loan shark victims, sukumbasis, backward classes and minorities - have formed their own political agencies to raise their voice. They are hopeful of a positive response from the government.  

The solutions to problems require identification of apt tools to find hidden truth concealed beneath the thin surface of democracy that makes the lives of the poor problematic and offering them training, technical and practical skills and access to resources to grow entrepreneurship, small-scale agro and other businesses depending on the availability of resources offered by the nation’s topographical diversity, modernisation of agricultural practices and animal husbandry. It is equally important to utilise creative research, unearth the unseen habit of inertia and unleash the creative potential of the poor at the bottom of the economic pyramid. When poverty is deep and embedded in the structural condition of the nation, development policy must be linked to the condition of their living, possession of space and the possibility to live in a community built on the spirit of compassion and constitutional rights.

Resource distribution

To bring the bottom of people into the light requires changing the structure of political economy and political culture. Policy change alone would not produce a better outcome if institutional culture and resource distribution remain skewed. An innovative spirit of reform in the government is one way to provide opportunity to the marginalised and wretched. Conscious application of science is another option to bring change non-violently. Revolutionary change legitimises brutality and does not make peace durable. It creates a condition without norms, thus offering psychopaths to flock around a multitude of crowds to challenge the constitutional order. 

 Legitimacy of violence inverts the order of nature and human society without changing selfish human nature, the nature of society and the condition of living. Violence in this sense is anti-politics. It strips political power from its public character. The game of politics is played with the rules of peaceful competition over leadership and policies. Anti-politics marks the decay of human civility. It fosters a relation of mutual exclusion from the democratic political process, greases the fertility of conflict dynamics in many spheres of national life and exhausts pluralistic Nepali society to get along. A democratic and peaceful Nepal requires the ending of this cycle and conjuring up an inclusive and egalitarian vision. Nepali constitution too purports to promote it beyond the ritual spell of prosperity. Those at the bottom of society seek not only oratorical compassion but resolute, genuine and positive outcomes of common goods. 

(Former Reader at the Department of Political Science, TU, Dahal writes on political and social issues.)